I've quit a few jobs when I've been offered something better, but can't remember ever having a hissy fit and quitting my job. I did get fired once, and that eventually cost the owner of the business so much money he had to sell the company, but I digress. After I retired from the Army in 2001 I went to work for a plant hire company, which was a pretty stressful job, dealing with angry customers and even angrier earthmoving equipment owner/operators, and in the 22 months that I was there before I got offered a better job and left, I saw quite a few guys and girls come and go. It was actually a great company to work for, and the owner was pretty generous, just a difficult job, most days.
One guy whose memory still makes me laugh, was an angry little ant called Ken. Ken was about the same age as me, stood all of 5 feet nothing tall and probably 90 pounds after a big meal, and proudly told me once that he'd had 20 jobs in 20 years. When I think about him now I wonder whether he might have been abused as a child, he was an orphan, so it's quite possible that he fell foul of a pedophile in an orphanage or foster home, he told me that he was never adopted, and bounced between institutions until he was old enough to quit school at 14 or 15, and start work. It would have been easy to label him a "Drama Queen", but I think there were some darker underlying issues there.
Ken had a pretty good rapport with the operators, he'd been a truck driver on and off for years, so he could talk the talk, but he was always cranky about something, and as his supervisor, I had to counsel him a few times about his attitude to both operators and customers alike. Surprisingly, we got on very well and I was sad to hear that he quit again shortly after I left.
One story that always cracks me up was when he was having a house built. He'd gone over to take a look at the job the brick layer had done on putting up the rear wall of the house. The builders had gone home for the day, and Ken decided that he didn't like the brick work, so he just pushed it all over, the whole rear wall of the house! The next morning the builder rang Ken at the office, and they had a massive argument over the phone, but the builder must have seen the error of his ways, because Ken didn't push the wall down a second time, and seemed quite happy with his new house. I left the plant hire company 15 years ago, but I still occasionally think about Ken and wonder how many jobs he's had since we last met.
